Subtítulos (150)
0:00Gail Caddy was the owner of this tiny,
0:03boutique hotel in the English countryside
when she came across a strange photo.
0:09It was a photo of her hotel.
It had the same white façade,
0:14the same arched doorway, black
placard, and name — “Rock Point Inn.”
0:21…Except it wasn’t her hotel. Not quite. The one in
the photo was newly built; hers was 250 years old.
0:32She soon discovered that her entire building
— along with the fish-and-chips restaurant
0:37next door — had been carefully reproduced,
brick-by-brick, on the other side of the planet.
0:44Unbeknownst to her, there were now two
Rock Point Inns: one in Lyme Regis,
0:50England — population: 3,000 — and one in the
suburbs of Shanghai — population: thirty million.
0:58And the more she learned,
the weirder things became.
1:03This, it turns out, was just one corner of
a $300 million British-themed neighborhood.
1:10There were bronze statues of Winston Churchill
and Princess Diana. There was an exact replica
1:16of a Christian church in Bristol. And there
were red telephone booths imported from London.
1:23Here, less than an hour outside China’s largest
city, police officers wore royal guard uniforms.
1:31Even this was just the tip of the iceberg.
1:35The British neighborhood was actually one
of nearly a dozen separate towns — each
1:40designed, at great expense, to simulate the
experience of living in a different country.
1:46The German one, for example, is home to
Volkswagen’s Chinese headquarters and,
1:51believe it or not, was built by the
son of Hitler’s chief architect.
1:56All across China, in fact, are
hundreds of miniature — and sometimes,
2:01not so miniature — Amsterdams,
Paris’, Londons, and New Yorks.
2:07You can visit Britain’s famous Tower Bridge
— complete with two extra towers — in Suzhou.
2:14If suburban McMansions and
palm trees are more your style,
2:18there’s a mock “Orange County,” outside Beijing.
2:21Hallstatt is a tiny, picturesque village in
the mountains of Austria. But you can visit
2:27an exact replica near Guangzhou. The mayor
of the real town even paid a visit in 2012.
2:35Or perhaps you prefer to live in snowy Jackson
Hole, Wyoming without ever leaving Northern China.
2:42The list goes on…
There’s a fake Louvre,
2:45Chrysler Building, White House, and
Versailles — to name just a few.
2:50China probably has more Eiffel Towers
than anywhere else on earth. This one
2:56looked a bit out of place at first,
but has since become more convincing.
3:02Clearly, these can’t all be the work of some
rogue city planner or eccentric millionaire.
3:08Something about the country’s political
and economic system unintentionally led
3:13to dozens of independent, yet
identical, Frances across China.
3:19That “something” begins with
the way cities earn revenue.
3:24Local governments pay for most of
their own teachers and doctors and
3:28police and fire fighters — as
they do in most of the world.
3:32Unlike most countries, however,
they aren’t allowed to collect
3:36much of their own tax revenue —
most of that ends up in Beijing.
3:41This creates for each city an acute
dilemma: how to pay for everything.
3:46Luckily, they do have one powerful
weapon at their disposal: land. …All
3:52of which is owned by the government, who
can sell it to developers for 100% profit.
3:59What this means is that, to stay in the black,
4:01mayors have no choice but to choose
quantity over quality. Opening a giant
4:07factory generates a massive windfall for the
city when it sells the land. But because it
4:13doesn’t generate much ongoing revenue, it
serves little purpose after it’s built.
4:18Just to keep the lights on, the city has to keep
building, expanding outward at lightning speed.
4:26Of course, this only works if someone
is willing to buy all the land.
4:31But that, until recently,
hasn’t been much of a problem…
4:35Here, China had three big things going for it:
4:40One, the population was growing even
faster than developers could keep up.
4:45Between 1980 and 2000, 267,000 people were born in
China each and every week. That’s a new Buffalo,
4:54New York, or St. Louis, Missouri every seven days.
4:59At roughly one child per household,
that’s a lot of new homes.
5:05Two: hundreds of millions
of families were moving from
5:08dilapidated homes in the countryside
to shiny new apartments in the city.
5:13And three, even those who didn’t want to
become homeowners really had no choice.
5:20China’s Capitalist turn at the end of the
twenty century created lots of new wealth,
5:25yet conspicuously few places to invest it.
5:29Sure, you could simply park
your money in the bank,
5:32but the government artificially
kept interest rates at or near zero.
5:37You could take it to the stock market, but
you may not have much luck there either.
5:42The Shanghai Stock Exchange has been
more-or-less flat for the last decade.
5:48Finally, strict capital controls limit how
much cash you can bring out of the country.
5:54That leaves approximately one place for the
world’s largest middle class and the country
5:58with one of the highest savings rates in
the world to store its wealth: housing.
6:04Until recently, Chinese real estate
was a no-brainer. You could stuff
6:09RMB under your mattress and watch
it dwindle away or you could stick
6:14it in the one certified money printing
machine — then undefeated for decades.
6:20All of this is to say: homes have
historically sold themselves in China!
6:26But it’s one thing to sell apartments in the heart
of Shanghai or Shenzhen — China’s New York and San
6:33Francisco. It’s quite another to sell them in its
equivalent of the Jersey suburbs or Inland Empire.
6:41As cities were forced to sell land further and
further from their downtown cores, developers,
6:47in turn, were forced to go to greater
and greater lengths to attract buyers.
6:52Yet China never experienced America’s
urban flight. Cities are still widely
6:58associated with wealth and
glamor, not noise and crime.
7:03Suburbs, therefore, are seen less as a
welcome escape and more as an unnatural exile.
7:11That’s where the Eiffel Towers come in.
7:15Real estate agents — famously skilled at
turning 200 square-foot studios into "cozy
7:20urban sanctuaries” — likewise transformed “weird,
single-family homes in the middle-of-nowhere”
7:26into the more aspirational promise
of “living the American Dream.”
7:31It’s actually quite clever…
7:34The buyers of these properties, remember,
are just looking for a safe place to store
7:39their wealth. Since they aren’t actually
going to move here anyway, the practical
7:44realities of living in a faux-7,000-year-old
Austrian village are relatively unimportant.
7:51And for developers, the European and
American themes are the perfect short-cut:
7:57they offer a ready-built architectural template,
create a spectacle that attracts attention,
8:04and allow them to capitalize on the
idealized image of an affluent “West.”
8:09Decades of rising home prices conditioned
a whole generation to see easy, guaranteed
8:15returns. Every empty field they’ve ever
seen was eventually colonized by factories;
8:22every housing complex soon sold out,
so why would these be any different?
8:29Something similar was happening in less desirable
third and fourth-tier cities across China.
8:36Say you’re the mayor of Chenzhou.
8:39Its population of 4.5 million would make
it one of the biggest metropolises in
8:44Europe or the Americas. In China, it’s so
overlooked that it’s hard to find video of.
8:52There are at least 44 larger Chinese cities.
8:56So, how do you put this
relative backwater “on the map?”
9:01Well, one way is to hand a famous architect
a blank check and tell them to go wild.
9:08Clearly, they understood these
instructions. China might just
9:12be the world’s capital of “weird” architecture.
9:16There’s a building shaped like a bird in
flight, a pair of pants, a ring, three men,
9:24eggs, a mountain range, the moon and the sun, an
octopus, a flower, spaceship, beehive, and forest.
9:36You name it and China probably has it.
9:40As a local bureaucrat, your incentives
were to drive short-term economic growth
9:45and quickly make a name for yourself
before being rotated to a new city.
9:50Approving that splashy new project puts
your name in the newspaper. Besides,
9:56you’ll be long gone by the time the
Orangatang-shaped hospital sits empty and unused.
10:03In other words, the more outlandish, the better.
10:07One overzealous official spent one third of his
city’s entire revenue building a replica of the
10:13U.S. Capitol to serve as a government office.
Meaning, Communist Party cadres work every day
10:20inside an architectural tribute to their country’s
greatest competitor. How’s that for soft power?
10:27Of course, when everyone tries to
stand out, no one does. Inevitably,
10:33this ignites a full-blown “weirdness” arms-race.
10:37Now, to some, this is all just an amusing —
perhaps even endearing — feature of the Chinese
10:43landscape. Sometimes you just stumble
into a random Stonehenge. Better than
10:50row after row of dreary Soviet-era high-rises!
10:55Xi Jinping, however, is not among them.
10:59After rising to power, Xi saw his mission as
correcting for the excesses of China’s long reform
11:05era — its rampant corruption, its uncoordinated
waste, and blind, “Western-obsessed” consumerism.
11:14“Weird” architecture was a symptom of all three.
11:18And so, in 2014, he “banned” it, in the vague,
11:22jargon-heavy way Party officials
do — by calling on cities to
11:27“strengthen their cultural confidence” and
“disseminate contemporary Chinese values.”
11:33And just like that, China’s “Las
Vegas” era was officially over.
11:39But there’s one place where China’s
early-2000s penchant for the opulent,
11:44the colossal, and the garish truly lives on —
a sort of living museum of that earlier era.
11:52About 20 miles away from Hong Kong is another
“Special Administrative Region” called Macau.
11:59Macau is one of the most densely-populated and
most land-deprived cities on earth. So, naturally,
12:06about 15 years ago, Las Vegas Sands’ Sheldon
Adelson — then America’s third-richest person
12:13— decided it would make the perfect place to
plop down a brand new, car-centric casino strip.
12:20The Venetian Macau is the
largest casino in the world. And,
12:24like its smaller Vegas counterpart,
includes an indoor gondola ride.
12:30Next door is The Parisian, complete —
you guessed it — with an Eiffel Tower.
12:35It’s one of the most surreal places I’ve ever
been — a fake Paris in a former Portuguese colony,
12:42culturally, largely Chinese, but not quite,
built by an American billionaire. In fact,
12:48I made a whole video about it, exclusively
available on our streaming service Nebula.
12:55Nebula is also home to dozens
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13:04look at the city’s attempt
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